kk this is my first attempt at RAW files ... i prefer jpegs because im new to dslrs.

couple things i'd like someone to help me with ... did i go with toooo much sharpness, or does it look ok?

also the Histogram had me a little blown out on the mid-to dark side, any way to fix such things in raw or did i just kind fail at the exposure on the orginal shot? ** looks good on my laptop screen but i've noticed more and more of my pictures "look" good to me exposure wise but when printing them out or posting cc's they tend to be under exposed in prints and coments on cc's

I personally like it. If you look closely, however, you can see the halos that appear due to shifting the sliders over too much. I like this effect on this particular image but it won't look good on other subjects so watch out for that.

cool.... now that you mention it, i should have went around to the other side, to block out the sky more to get a better droplet... kept getting overexposed droplets and only way i could compensate was to lower the exposure a bit while shooting, didn't really mess with the exposure to much during pp. just mainly trying to get a "crisp" "sharp" image

The tricky part is to get some light from the back which creates the sparkle in the droplets.

That's the challenge when shooting nature, wildlife etc. outdoors. You can't move the sun and it takes careful scouting to pick the subject or where it's going to be (birds etc.) so the sun works in your favor and you don't run into any other issues.

Even in your case when the subject isn't moving, it doesn't mean that it makes it any easier to take a great picture of it